The Megyn Kelly Show - 20220308_biden-blocks-russian-oil-and-how-weak-leadership-l
Aired: 2022-03-08
Duration: 01:30:47


=== Climate Activists and Putin (15:51) ===

[00:00:00]  Welcome to the Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
[00:00:11]  Hey, everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly.
[00:00:13]  Welcome to the Megyn Kelly Show.
[00:00:15]  So much news to get to today as the implications of Russia's invasion of Ukraine grow.
[00:00:20]  In just a bit, we are going to be joined by Rick Grinnell, who's got a lot of thoughts on how tough diplomacy might have helped avoid some of this.
[00:00:28]  But first, after facing pressure from Republicans and More importantly, from Democrats, his own party.
[00:00:36]  President Joe Biden just announced a short time ago that the United States will ban Russian oil imports.
[00:00:44]  Now, the U.S. only gets about 7% of its oil from Russia, but it's a move the president was nonetheless reluctant to do because we've got gas prices hitting an all time record high right now.
[00:00:55]  And there's some reporting out of Fox News right now and the New York Times as well, which sort of dovetails on it, suggesting weirdly, this was a weird race between Joe Biden and his Democratic colleagues over in the Congress.
[00:01:08]  To see who could ban the Russian oil imports first.
[00:01:10]  They were going to make them look bad.
[00:01:12]  So he ran out to the mic to say, I'm banning it.
[00:01:14]  I'm the one who did it.
[00:01:17]  So what does it mean?
[00:01:18]  Anything?
[00:01:19]  There's no better person to ask than Michael Schellenberger.
[00:01:22]  For years, he's been the best selling author of the book Apocalypse Never.
[00:01:26]  He has been warning the United States and Europe that these delusional green energy policies we've been pushing were leaving us and our European friends too reliant on countries.
[00:01:38]  Like Russia.
[00:01:40]  And he joins me now.
[00:01:40]  Michael, so, so good to have you back.
[00:01:42]  So, Joe Biden is saying we're going to get rid of these 7%, you know, the 7% of oil imports here in the United States.
[00:01:50]  And that's a middle finger to Russia.
[00:01:52]  And it could help increase pressure on them when it, you know, already refiners are getting reluctant, I guess, to handle Russian crude because they're worried the Europeans might jump on board now.
[00:02:03]  And there's amping up pressure.
[00:02:05]  So, what does it mean, if anything?
[00:02:07]  Thanks for having me back, Megan.
[00:02:08]  It's been really, it's a pleasure to come back.
[00:02:12]  I don't know how anybody could see Russian shelling of Ukrainian apartment buildings and the killing of civilians and not want to cut off economic ties with that country.
[00:02:22]  Anybody that knows anything about Putin knows that he's willing to inflict significant amounts of human misery to achieve his objectives.
[00:02:29]  So, pretty horrible situation.
[00:02:32]  As you pointed out, the United States gets 7% of its oil from Russia.
[00:02:37]  Europe gets more like 40%, which is why Germany certainly, which is why you're not seeing Them quick to follow.
[00:02:44]  Unfortunately, all of the machines that power modern life and that power our economy are still petroleum.
[00:02:50]  And you can't just kind of from one day to the next switch to electric cars or biofuels or hydrogen fuel cells.
[00:02:57]  It just doesn't work that way.
[00:02:58]  Our society runs on big machines.
[00:03:01]  So it's not great.
[00:03:04]  We shouldn't, you know, Europe should not have become so dependent on Russian oil, gas, and other energy fuels.
[00:03:11]  That's the bottom line.
[00:03:12]  And You know, to give you a sense of it, 15 years ago, Europe produced more natural gas than Russia does today.
[00:03:18]  Today, Russia exports three times more than Europe produces.
[00:03:23]  So the basic numbers here are super simple.
[00:03:25]  Europe just consumes two to three times more energy than it produces, and Russia exports two to three times more than it produces, depending on the fuel.
[00:03:33]  And that's the bottom line.
[00:03:34]  And you can't power societies on unreliable solar panels, made in China, by the way, or on unreliable wind turbines.
[00:03:42]  We still need these fossil fuels or nuclear plants, but they've also been shutting those down.
[00:03:46]  In Europe.
[00:03:46]  So, unfortunately, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the Europeans kind of brought this on themselves, and the United States didn't do any favors to them.
[00:03:55]  And frankly, all the banks got involved in repressing oil and gas production when we should have been increasing it.
[00:04:01]  The Europeans are notably not going along.
[00:04:03]  And according to what I read, they are really not even in a position to go along because since they get, it's, I guess, 40% of their gas from Russia, and gas, as I understand it, is a lot tougher to replace than oil.
[00:04:18]  So while other providers might be able to step in and fill the void if what they needed was oil, if Europe decided to get tough, much tougher to backstop the gas.
[00:04:29]  And even if they said, We don't want to shut off gas, right?
[00:04:35]  We'll keep the gas relationship going with Russia, but we're going to follow the United States and shut off the oil.
[00:04:40]  Putin has been saying, You do that, and I'm shutting off the gas.
[00:04:44]  Because before there was Nord Stream 2, there was Nord Stream 1.
[00:04:49]  And already, this is, correct me if I'm wrong, you're the expert, and you know me and the energy, and I'm struggling to follow all of it.
[00:04:56]  But Nord Stream 1 is what Russia uses to get gas to Europe right now.
[00:05:00]  And he, Putin, has been defensively saying, You get too tough with me, Europe.
[00:05:04]  On oil, you're going to pay the price on gas and don't think I won't do it.
[00:05:09]  Yeah, that's absolutely correct.
[00:05:11]  I mean, basically, Europe got itself in a position where it can be controlled by Putin.
[00:05:17]  I mean, it just sounds terrible, but the consequences look, we may have a recession with oil prices at their level now.
[00:05:25]  I mean, when oil prices go to 100 and they could go to $200 a barrel, which, by the way, is $6 to $7 a gallon of gasoline for Americans.
[00:05:34]  That often triggers a recession.
[00:05:36]  And so, you know, and of course, it's really the worst of all worlds, Megan.
[00:05:40]  I mean, I think the other thing people haven't been talking about is that Russia's going to be able to sell that oil to China.
[00:05:45]  You know, you saw a shell even bought it and then it apologized like a couple days later for buying a bunch of Russian oil.
[00:05:50]  But Russia's still going to be able to sell that oil.
[00:05:53]  There's not really any good solution here.
[00:05:56]  I think it's unfortunately unlikely that anything like these sanctions or even more significant is going to stop Putin from invading and taking over Ukraine.
[00:06:08]  I think that really, Biden is well within his rights, and maybe it's a good idea for him to restrict oil exports from the United States abroad in order to keep oil prices lower at home, gasoline prices.
[00:06:19]  But if he does that, that's just going to strengthen Putin's hands even further.
[00:06:22]  It's going to make it easier for Putin to basically bribe countries with the offer of oil and gas or cheaper oil and gas in exchange for them kind of going along with Ukraine or really whatever Putin wants.
[00:06:33]  So it's, as I pointed out, the West has had its head in the clouds.
[00:06:38]  I mean, we've been in these fantasies of harmonizing with nature.
[00:06:42]  Through renewables.
[00:06:43]  It's had a lot of, I think most people can detect a religious tone to it.
[00:06:48]  Obviously, big financial interests, the bankers, and importing solar panels from China and becoming dependent on Russia.
[00:06:54]  But I do think that Putin had his feet more firmly on the ground.
[00:06:58]  He knew that what he did basically was just build a bunch of nuclear plants to replace the gas they were using for electricity.
[00:07:04]  And then he exported the gas abroad and made Europe dependent.
[00:07:07]  So that's the same strategy, really, anywhere.
[00:07:09]  I mean, if we want to have greater energy independence, Either for ourselves or for Europe, there's no alternative to basically building reliable sources of energy, particularly nuclear plants.
[00:07:20]  But if it has to be coal, so that you're not so dependent on imported natural gas, and then they have to expand gas production.
[00:07:26]  And the problem with expanding gas production, as you pointed out, is it just takes a lot longer than doing, you know, even coal for that matter.
[00:07:35]  Nuclear also takes a while.
[00:07:36]  So not a lot of great options.
[00:07:39]  And really, it's the case that we have to learn from our mistakes.
[00:07:41]  Yeah, this required years of planning.
[00:07:43]  And so, by the way, everybody should be subscribing to your Substack because.
[00:07:47]  It's great.
[00:07:47]  It's wonderful access to Michael and all of his expertise.
[00:07:51]  And you posted one on March 3rd called The West's Green Energy Delusions Empowered Putin.
[00:07:58]  And it really walks us through what happened here, similar to what you just said.
[00:08:02]  You write, while Putin expanded Russia's oil production, expanded natural gas production, and then doubled nuclear energy production to allow more exports of its precious gas, Europe, led by Germany, shut down its nuclear power plants, closed gas fields, and refused to develop more through advanced methods like fracking.
[00:08:24]  So they were going in exactly two opposing directions.
[00:08:29]  And that's how they empowered him.
[00:08:32]  You write, you posit that's what he understood and nobody else seemed to when calculating the risks of invading Ukraine.
[00:08:41]  Yeah, you got it.
[00:08:42]  And you even alluded to something that I haven't even mentioned yet, which is maybe one of the biggest and most important elements of the story is that you now have the former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the former Secretary General of NATO, a well respected French professor at one of their leading universities, basically the equivalent of their MIT in France.
[00:09:02]  All saying that the Russian government financed anti fracking activism in Europe by climate activists to stop natural gas production in Europe, which would have made the continent less reliant on Russian gas.
[00:09:15]  So they're now, I mean, and so, you know, I haven't seen the intelligence directly, but I mean, it would be quite a conspiracy theory for them all to mention it, especially, you know, given that Hillary at the time was trying to tell people that she was, you know, better on climate in the United States.
[00:09:31]  It's around 2014.
[00:09:33]  We also report that the Russians financed almost 100.
[00:09:37]  Million dollars in anti fracking advocacy in Great Britain, where they have a lot of shale.
[00:09:41]  But there's a lot of shale in Europe, too.
[00:09:43]  I mean, people think it's just in the United States where you can frack.
[00:09:46]  It's not the case.
[00:09:46]  You could do it in Europe.
[00:09:48]  So I think that's pretty wild, you know, where you basically have a story where confirmed at the highest levels of government by people that are quite friendly to action on climate change, saying that climate activists funded by Putin were a big part of making Europe dependent on Putin.
[00:10:03]  Of shaming Europe out of developing its own or just continuing the development of its own energy supplies.
[00:10:10]  And instead turning to Vladimir Putin.
[00:10:12]  Right, exactly.
[00:10:13]  And because now you say there are things that they can do.
[00:10:15]  So far, we haven't seen it.
[00:10:18]  Germany has said they're going to shut down Nord Stream 2 permanently.
[00:10:22]  Okay, that's one thing.
[00:10:23]  That's good.
[00:10:24]  But Germany has, you point out in one of these pieces, six nuclear power plants, right?
[00:10:29]  They shut down three and they're about to shut down the other three.
[00:10:31]  And it's totally unnecessary.
[00:10:33]  They can help save themselves, maybe not that easily now that they've already pulled the plug on three of them.
[00:10:39]  But you tell me how feasible it is for them to rejigger that.
[00:10:42]  Well, yeah, and I should also say, in the midst of all, there's so many things to talk about.
[00:10:45]  I mean, in the midst of all the chaos, there was also a gunfight, gun battle between Ukrainian forces and Russian forces at a nuclear plant.
[00:10:53]  So we had this little, we had like a nuclear scarlet, you know, it was just a minor scare in the history of nuclear scares.
[00:11:02]  And the interesting story, of course, the plants, the reactors that have been operating have kept operating because they want them for electricity.
[00:11:09]  You know, the irony, of course, both sides have an interest in maintaining those nuclear plants.
[00:11:13]  So actually, all is all that ended well.
[00:11:15]  Certainly, Plenty of dangers in that region, but you can see where people are getting killed.
[00:11:19]  It's by civilian attacks.
[00:11:21]  But yeah, to your point, I mean, nuclear provides this reliable source of energy.
[00:11:25]  So, the bottom line is Germany could just burn more coal or they could do nuclear.
[00:11:30]  And the difference is that the nuclear plants emit basically no carbon emissions, a small amount of very, very small amount of carbon emissions in their total life cycle, whereas the coal plants are the dirtiest fossil fuel producing significant amounts of carbon emissions.
[00:11:44]  That's the bottom line.
[00:11:45]  So, I think that's the wake up call.
[00:11:47]  It's that all this stuff about solar panels and wind turbines.
[00:11:51]  They're just not reliable enough.
[00:11:52]  They've spread them over so many distances.
[00:11:55]  They've captured the best wind and sunlight they can.
[00:11:57]  They're just at their physical limit, basically.
[00:12:02]  So, yeah, it's not a great situation.
[00:12:05]  Well, you pointed out when our first interview together how you once were part of Greenpeace.
[00:12:12]  I mean, you are of the left.
[00:12:14]  You were an activist.
[00:12:15]  You really cared about the environment, about American land, and so on and so forth, and sort of came to these views on what the right place to go was.
[00:12:22]  P.S.
[00:12:23]  It's nuclear organically.
[00:12:25]  You worked during the Obama administration on the Solyndra deal.
[00:12:29]  You really were put, you were a true believer.
[00:12:32]  After testing all these things out and seeing them fail, you came to realize a lot of these renewables are fraught and are worse for the environment than, for example, nuclear, which has gotten a bad rap.
[00:12:43]  And you write in one of your pieces a little bit about this, and it jumped out at me given what we talked about.
[00:12:48]  And people should go back and check out that episode while we're through time.
[00:12:50]  You write Germany has spent lavishly on weather dependent renewables, right?
[00:12:54]  So they're going the same way our president's trying to push us right now to the tune of $36 billion a year, mainly solar panels and industrial wind turbines.
[00:13:05]  Same for us.
[00:13:06]  But those have their problems.
[00:13:07]  You're right, solar panels have to go somewhere, and a solar plant in Europe needs 400 to 800 times more land than natural gas or nuclear plants to make the same amount of power.
[00:13:22]  And you continue, farmland has to be cut apart to host solar.
[00:13:25]  This is one of your issues, that it's not all about carbon emissions.
[00:13:30]  If you care about the environment, you have to take a serious look at what solar and wind reliance is doing to our land.
[00:13:39]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:13:40]  And, you know, I pointed out, I tweeted also yesterday, you know, that nuclear heavy France, or that rather I should say Germany, which is moving away from nuclear, as you noted, it closed three reactors at the end of last year and it's going to close three more unless it stops the closure at the end of this year.
[00:13:57]  Germany produces six times more carbon emissions per unit of electricity as France.
[00:14:03]  And then everybody says, oh, nuclear is just too expensive or something and renewables are cheap.
[00:14:07]  Well, if that were the case, then.
[00:14:09]  Then French electricity wouldn't cost 59% of what German electricity costs.
[00:14:13]  So you can see it at continent wide levels.
[00:14:15]  You know, I mean, look, it's like, and, you know, as for natural gas, particularly if you don't have nuclear, natural gas is the reason that US carbon emissions declined by 22% between the year 2005 and 2020, which was five percentage points more than we were supposed to reduce them under the United Nations Paris Climate Agreement.
[00:14:37]  So if you're really concerned about the climate, then you should be in favor of natural gas and nuclear.
[00:14:42]  And thus, we should be suspicious of people who call themselves climate activists like Greta Thunberg, like Al Gore, like John Kerry, who are constantly either trashing, criticizing, or dismissing the importance of nuclear and natural gas and fracking.
[00:14:59]  Yeah, fracking, because that's how you get the gas out of shale.
[00:15:03]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:15:04]  I mean, these are all things I learned from you.
[00:15:06]  And our first episode for people who are climate dummies like yours truly, go back and listen to that episode.
[00:15:11]  I'll give you the number in just a minute as my team looks it up.
[00:15:13]  Because Michael walks you through it and sort of explains this is what natural gas is, this is how we get it, this is what we do with oil, and so on and so forth.
[00:15:19]  Very good primer.
[00:15:20]  Yeah, you write Berlin was faced with a choice between unleashing the wrath of Putin on neighboring countries or inviting the wrath of Greta Thunberg.
[00:15:30]  They chose Putin.
[00:15:31]  That's exactly it, right?
[00:15:32]  They allowed, well, Putin's propaganda machine and Greta Thunberg, who knows nothing about anything, to shame them out of meaningful domestic energy production and got themselves and Kind of the rest of us into the position we're in right now where Putin's got the upper hand and he knows it.

=== Punishing Ourselves for Sanctions (14:22) ===

[00:15:51]  Yeah.
[00:15:51]  I mean, it's a huge scandal because, I mean, look, there's so much noise right now, Megan, as you see on Twitter, people talking about military action by the United States against Russia.
[00:16:02]  It's just not going to happen.
[00:16:03]  Like, we're two nuclear armed powers, like, Forget about it.
[00:16:07]  Anything that gets you close to conflict with another nuclear armed power, you want to avoid.
[00:16:11]  Everybody knows this, school children know that.
[00:16:13]  So that's not going to happen.
[00:16:15]  Similarly, the politicians are not going to want to keep oil prices at super high levels because the public is going to pay for it.
[00:16:22]  I mean, we're facing, I don't think people totally understand this yet.
[00:16:25]  I mean, we're facing very significant sustained energy prices, which means high food prices.
[00:16:32]  We're also potentially seeing some disruption of wheat production.
[00:16:36]  I mean, it doesn't have to be this way, but it could be.
[00:16:39]  Coming from Ukraine, which is a major global supplier of wheat.
[00:16:42]  It's considered the breadbasket of Europe.
[00:16:44]  So we could be seeing energy, food, electricity shortages.
[00:16:49]  We could be seeing, it could be a significantly worse situation than the food shortages that triggered the Arab Spring.
[00:16:56]  I think it's very clearly the worst energy crisis since 1973.
[00:17:01]  I now see other people are saying that as well.
[00:17:03]  So, and people suffer when you don't have reliable sources of energy.
[00:17:08]  So, I think it's, yeah, I think it's really, I think it says something about the potential decay of our civilization and really the decline of the West that it really allowed itself to indulge in this kind of, frankly, pretty decadent secular religion where it imagined that we were all going to become part of nature with renewables, even though they were, you know, solar panels are made by enslaved Uyghur Muslims in Chinese factories using coal.
[00:17:36]  It's like one of the worst, you know, processes for humans.
[00:17:40]  I mean, I'm a little bit.
[00:17:42]  I mean, I feel a little upset too because you kind of see all the concern from the Ukrainians.
[00:17:46]  And of course, I do too.
[00:17:48]  I also feel it for the Africans who have, you know, people in the Congo who have suffered significantly producing the minerals for renewables.
[00:17:55]  Also for the Muslims in China who have been producing these solar panels.
[00:17:59]  So you kind of go, you know, what are we, what was this about?
[00:18:02]  It was about a kind of delusion.
[00:18:04]  And it was one that was actively harmful in many situations to people and also harmful to natural environments while at the same time strengthening Putin and making it so that really there was no consequence.
[00:18:16]  For him in invading Ukraine.
[00:18:17]  I mean, there's some I know right now, some sanctions.
[00:18:20]  I don't want to overstate it.
[00:18:22]  I support the resistance movement, but I just think we got ourselves in a situation where, like, to punish Putin is really punishing ourselves.
[00:18:30]  Right.
[00:18:30]  And we're in the position now of imposing these sanctions through the front door as we fund this war through the back door.
[00:18:36]  I mean, as we in Europe continue buying his oil and gas, where do you think that money's going?
[00:18:42]  It's going into those tanks, it's going to pay those soldiers.
[00:18:45]  So, what role will we play?
[00:18:46]  And you see a very petulant.
[00:18:48]  The moral high ground.
[00:18:49]  No, I'm just saying we don't have the moral high ground here unless we get serious about this.
[00:18:54]  And I think we see, sorry to interrupt, I think we see a kind of petulance on the part of people that use their ignorance as sort of cover for their demand, which is sort of like, we just have to stop using oil.
[00:19:07]  It's like, are you aware of the machinery?
[00:19:11]  I think people don't even realize that we have this entire system built up around powerful machines that move us from place to place and that deliver Amazon boxes to our doorsteps and that make.
[00:19:22]  It's possible to eat food.
[00:19:24]  And people are so in the West have been so disconnected from the productive sectors of the economy.
[00:19:29]  They've been so disconnected from how things are made, how things are powered.
[00:19:34]  And I think it's a wake up call in that sense.
[00:19:36]  You still see some of that, these kind of petulant demands that somehow we're going to do.
[00:19:39]  I mean, we saw Kamala Harris yesterday.
[00:19:41]  I mean, I thought one of the most interesting things was like literally the same day that Kamala Harris says, we have all the electric vehicle technology we need, we can just use it now.
[00:19:49]  And it's like, hey, it's just not true on so many levels.
[00:19:52]  We don't even have the electricity.
[00:19:54]  To power all those electric vehicles.
[00:19:56]  And it was Elon Musk, who makes not just the greatest electric vehicle ever made, but maybe one of the greatest cars that's ever been made, who goes on to Twitter and is like, We need to produce more oil and gas.
[00:20:06]  Like, you can't just scale up.
[00:20:08]  You can't, I mean, Tesla is producing a lot of amazing cars, but nothing close to the.
[00:20:13]  You can't just, and you can't turn that stuff around overnight in time to deal with a cutoff of oil from Russia.
[00:20:18]  So I think people will look back on this time as a wake up to the limits of renewables, to the dangers of not having sufficient nuclear, to the dangers of not having significant oil and gas production.
[00:20:30]  You know, it's going to take us a while just to convert our refineries to be able to refine the petroleum from American shales.
[00:20:37]  It's going to take a while to build the pipelines and the LNG facilities, which, by the way, the climate activists here blocked.
[00:20:43]  Yeah.
[00:20:44]  So, one of the first things Biden did was he got Keystone shut down and he opened up Nord Stream 2.
[00:20:49]  So, we're less energy independent.
[00:20:53]  And so was Germany.
[00:20:55]  But you know who was doing really well?
[00:20:57]  Russia, getting stronger by the day.
[00:20:59]  Let me ask you a quick question about another piece of the Biden plan.
[00:21:03]  He was touting the other day the fact that we and our partners had released 60 million barrels from the world's strategic.
[00:21:12]  Petroleum reserves.
[00:21:13]  30 million came from ours.
[00:21:14]  The other 30 million came from other partners.
[00:21:18]  What I understand is that just here in America, we consume 20 million barrels, the equivalent of 20 million barrels a day.
[00:21:26]  So that's a few days worth of oil.
[00:21:29]  I'm not sure that does that do anything?
[00:21:31]  Am I looking at that the wrong way?
[00:21:33]  No, you're looking at the right way.
[00:21:35]  Unfortunately, these are all these symbolic measures.
[00:21:38]  I mean, people, there's like sort of two worlds, you know?
[00:21:40]  Like if you go into like, Energy analysts like on Twitter, like serious people who, you know, the industries need to pay attention to.
[00:21:49]  They're just like, this is, I mean, the idea that there's some quick fix to this dependence on Russian energy is just considered absurd.
[00:21:57]  And then there's like the political realm where the politicians want to seem to be demonstrating their care for the Ukrainians.
[00:22:04]  And I want to demonstrate my care for the Ukrainians too, and will and do, you know, but it's also like we're not being really honest with people about what the situation is here.
[00:22:15]  Um, so I mean, I just think you know, part of it is like, yeah, like, you know, I think what's crazy is that Joe Biden is in Texas today, he's not meeting with the oil and gas guys.
[00:22:24]  Like, the Biden administration keeps saying, Well, we have all these open leases and the oil and gas industry won't use them.
[00:22:30]  Well, part of it from my interviews is that they are, yeah, first of all, looking to make money after they lost money for a long period of time.
[00:22:38]  Um, you know, they were punished.
[00:22:40]  You look at the last few years, you should have seen oil and gas production ramping up, increasing over the last several years.
[00:22:46]  It didn't.
[00:22:47]  Part of it was there were some companies that Tried to raise money on the stock market by expanding oil and gas production, and they were punished for it in part because of these climate concerns.
[00:22:57]  I've had people say, no, it was also just the cyclical nature of oil and gas development.
[00:23:02]  That's true, but there's now a pretty big consensus, including the New York Times main oil reporter, oil and gas reporter, reported on the same thing, which is that you just haven't seen the production coming from the oil and gas industry because they've been sent the message even before Biden, really from the banking community, but also from lawmakers and the public.
[00:23:22]  That we just don't want more oil and gas.
[00:23:24]  We would all just rather use solar panels and electric cars.
[00:23:27]  And I think the message here from, you know, obviously the crisis in Russia, but now we're hearing it directly from Elon Musk is that that's just not something you can, you can't just, you know, flip a switch and suddenly, you know, turn over the entire machinery that powers your society overnight.
[00:23:45]  That makes perfect sense.
[00:23:46]  This is particularly on point because there was a contentious exchange, I think it was between Fox and Jen Psaki the other day of the administration saying, you know, What's the deal?
[00:23:57]  And she was saying, look, there are 900 leases that have yet to be out for oil and gas development that have yet to be.
[00:24:05]  Or licenses that have yet to be used.
[00:24:08]  So understand, you know, it's not us, it's not our policies that are stopping domestic oil production.
[00:24:12]  And your point is, no, but you are the ones who created an environment in which they thought there would be absolutely no market for this.
[00:24:18]  They get shamed for doing the very thing that they were created to do.
[00:24:23]  And we get patted on the head by Greta Turnberg, or not really, because she doesn't really praise anyone.
[00:24:29]  But that's our goal, as opposed to becoming energy independent like we were during the Trump years, frankly, a lot closer to it than we are right now.
[00:24:39]  Yeah, I mean, look, I think what's missing is leadership once again.
[00:24:42]  I mean, I see it at all levels of society, Frank.
[00:24:44]  It's kind of terrifying to some extent.
[00:24:48]  You know, the president really, we should be seriously with a serious strategy to increase oil and gas production immediately.
[00:24:55]  I mean, you're seeing this from Elon Musk.
[00:24:57]  You're seeing it from Mark Andreessen, one of the co creators of Netscape and a well known venture capitalist.
[00:25:02]  You know, you're seeing it from people like me who, you know, longtime advocate of renewables, longtime advocate of nuclear, but This is a crisis situation.
[00:25:13]  You're talking again about not just $7 potentially a gallon of gasoline in the United States, but a global recession, global food shortages.
[00:25:22]  I mean, this is urgent.
[00:25:24]  It may be that there's a reshuffling of blocks, that Russia and China are going to get closer after this, which is not great.
[00:25:31]  We see sort of the United States going a separate way from Europe on this, which is that we're going to ban Russian oil, but the Germans and the Europeans are still going to use it.
[00:25:41]  So the West is divided, has no strategy.
[00:25:44]  The president of the United States has no strategy to increase energy production to bring down prices.
[00:25:50]  We're not seeing anything.
[00:25:51]  We're seeing from the European Union call for more unreliable renewables imported from China.
[00:25:56]  And now you're seeing the consequence of these sanctions pushing Putin into China's hands, where China's going to get a great deal buying discounted Russian energy and food potentially.
[00:26:09]  So I think we're at the end of an era.
[00:26:12]  I mean, I think it's not just the end of the post Cold War era.
[00:26:16]  From the last 30 years, but really it's the end of the post war era that's been around for the last 47 years.
[00:26:23]  It's a changing of the, and I don't think we've got leadership in place that is really describing the challenge honestly to the American people and describing what it's going to take to become energy independent and to deal with these.
[00:26:36]  There are real world trade offs.
[00:26:37]  I think, on the other hand, one of the things I think is important is to do actually what Putin did, which is to build a lot of nuclear plants so that your natural gas reserves can be exported.
[00:26:48]  That way, we can export our gas to Europe and reduce its reliance on Russia over the long term.
[00:26:53]  But again, Megan, these are things that are going to take years, not days.
[00:26:58]  And we need a president who demonstrates the leadership to be able to explain this to the American people, explain what the sacrifices are that people would be willing to make.
[00:27:06]  Because I do think Americans do feel compassionate for the Ukrainians.
[00:27:10]  I think we do want a solution and we do want to contribute to a better outcome, including less reliance on the Russians.
[00:27:15]  But that means being really honest about what's going to solve this and that some temporary sanctions.
[00:27:22]  You know, or permanent sanctions even on Russian oil imports is not going to cut it.
[00:27:27]  That there needs to be a significant expansion of nuclear power, natural gas, and oil production at home so that we, in part, we can export some of it to our allies abroad.
[00:27:36]  It's an all hands on deck situation here, and we have the means to do it.
[00:27:41]  We're just not using them.
[00:27:43]  We too, it's not just Germany shutting down its nuclear power plants, we're doing it as well.
[00:27:48]  And if you're like I used to be and think, oh, well, those are dangerous and they leak bad things into the environment, and I don't want to.
[00:27:55]  Drink water that has nuclear waste in it, or have my kid growing up next to a nuclear power plant.
[00:28:01]  Think again, go back and listen to episode 94.
[00:28:05]  That we had with Michael, or just read his book, Apocalypse Never, or look at his TED Talks, which have gazillions of millions of views for very good reasons.
[00:28:15]  He's an honest broker.
[00:28:16]  He's taken a hard look at all the options, and nuclear's the way.
[00:28:21]  And yet, we're not listening.
[00:28:23]  Will we now?
[00:28:24]  Always a pleasure.
[00:28:25]  Michael Schellenberger, thank you so much for being here.
[00:28:27]  Thanks for having me on, Megan.
[00:28:29]  So, one of the things that we didn't talk about with Michael was the fact that the United States is now saying that since we're shutting off 8% of our oil imports, we are going to talk.
[00:28:38]  To Venezuela and Saudi Arabia about backfilling those numbers.
[00:28:45]  Saudi Arabia, the country that Joe Biden, then candidate Joe Biden, promised to make a pariah when he was on the campaign trail, or we'll just increase our business with them.
[00:28:55]  Venezuela, who we effectively ostracized over the past 10 years.
[00:28:59]  Nope, let's, with a handshake, replace Russia for Venezuela.
[00:29:04]  See how that goes.
[00:29:05]  Ambassador Rick Grinnell is with us next, and he's going to have some thoughts on that.
[00:29:12]  All the enemies who are very upmarksome, they have been able to get all the people together.
[00:29:18]  Look at this video before you get more upmarksome.
[00:29:32]  The civilian death toll in Ukraine is rising.
[00:29:35]  As the UN says, some 2 million refugees have now fled due to war.
[00:29:40]  Ukraine is a country of about 44 million people.
[00:29:43]  And Europe's now dealing with that influx of refugees to other countries.
[00:29:48]  Poland is said to be considering sending fighter jets to Ukraine.
[00:29:52]  That would be a significant escalation.
[00:29:54]  I'm joined now by former acting director of national intelligence and former U.S. ambassador to Germany, Rick Grinnell.
[00:30:02]  So, so glad to have you here today, Rick.
[00:30:04]  So, can we start there?
[00:30:06]  If Poland steps in to create its own no fly zone of sorts, what do we do with that?

=== Europe's Security Dilemma (05:07) ===

[00:30:14]  Well, first of all, thanks for having me.
[00:30:15]  It's good to be here.
[00:30:16]  This is trying times and it's really hard to have thoughtful conversations.
[00:30:20]  So, thank you for having long form, thoughtful conversations on what's happening.
[00:30:25]  Look, I think that the Polish stepping up is a real sign for Europe.
[00:30:31]  Look, Americans have been very frustrated with the European responses over the last decade.
[00:30:38]  I have a lot of thoughts on Merkel.
[00:30:41]  We should probably do a whole show on the mistakes of Chancellor Merkel.
[00:30:46]  And I think that there is a beginning, I see it in the German media now, a real concentration on Merkelism, probably worse than socialism.
[00:30:56]  And what we need to be able to do is be really honest about what's been happening over the last years to look at the Polish decision.
[00:31:04]  Poland is stepping up to lead in Europe.
[00:31:07]  And this is a European problem.
[00:31:10]  And I think that what we're seeing is the ability to step away from NATO in Europe and say, this is our neighborhood.
[00:31:17]  This is not just a NATO response where we include the Americans, but now this is an EU European response.
[00:31:24]  And by the way, Megan, it's exactly what Trump wanted, which was to get our allies to do more.
[00:31:31]  America first is not just bringing our troops home and putting America first, but it's getting the allies to do more.
[00:31:37]  And that's a good thing.
[00:31:39]  You know what's so crazy is like, and I know you know this of all the people, but as we were all focused on stupid fake Russia gate, right?
[00:31:46]  We, the American media, and on stupid tweets.
[00:31:51]  Right.
[00:31:52]  Those were real, but also led to so much distraction here in the country and the media and so on.
[00:32:00]  Trump was out there saying things like Germany needs to spend more of its money on its own domestic military.
[00:32:07]  Build up.
[00:32:07]  Germany needs to pay its fair share with respect to NATO.
[00:32:11]  Germany is too dependent on Russia for its energy supplies.
[00:32:16]  There was a tweet in 2018.
[00:32:19]  This is Trump saying, Germany, as far as I'm concerned, is captive to Russia because it's getting so much of its energy from Russia.
[00:32:29]  And Angela Merkel, who everybody loved, they called her the last serious leader in the West.
[00:32:34]  Schellenberger was writing about this.
[00:32:37]  She came out and said, Our country can make our own policies and make our own.
[00:32:40]  Own decisions.
[00:32:42]  That was the adult in the room.
[00:32:44]  Where's she now?
[00:32:45]  Why doesn't she come out and try to take responsibility and speak to the position she's left her country and Europe in?
[00:32:53]  Oh, where to begin?
[00:32:54]  That was fantastic there.
[00:32:56]  First of all, the conversation you had with Schellenberg was amazing.
[00:33:00]  I have to go back and re listen to it.
[00:33:02]  I know, me too.
[00:33:03]  There's a lot of great stuff in there.
[00:33:06]  One thing to point out about Merkelism is that, you know, it's a very elite centric.
[00:33:14]  Movement.
[00:33:15]  And the elites in Berlin will defend what she did to the end.
[00:33:20]  I've been a part of a lot of conversations between President Trump and Chancellor Merkel.
[00:33:25]  And, you know, you can look at even the picture book from President Trump where he describes Chancellor Merkel.
[00:33:32]  There's incredible respect.
[00:33:34]  First of all, I've been in the room where he says, look, Chancellor, I don't blame you for wanting to get the best deal for Germany.
[00:33:41]  And by the way, you've outsmarted a lot of presidents before me.
[00:33:44]  You've got 50,000.
[00:33:45]  American troops, if you count the rotational troops, and you yet don't have a serious military.
[00:33:53]  You're not paying your fair share, but you have a budget surplus.
[00:33:56]  We know all of these arguments.
[00:33:58]  But for President Trump to kind of hit Chancellor Merkel hard on it, her only response is, well, Donald, you know, I have the Bundestag and I have to deal with multiple parties.
[00:34:10]  To which President Trump would say, you think dealing with Congress is easy?
[00:34:14]  We have the same issues here.
[00:34:17]  But what's transformed, and I don't think Americans quite understand, is that the Merkel leadership of the Christian Democrats of the CDU, her coalition government was with the socialists, who included as her finance chair Olaf Scholz, Minister of Finance Olaf Scholz, who is now the chancellor.
[00:34:36]  So the socialists really dumped the CDU and said, You're not helping here.
[00:34:43]  The 180 turnaround from Olaf Scholz.
[00:34:48]  Is a monumental movement in Germany to reject Merkelism, to reject the CDU at a time when the Germans just don't do that.
[00:35:00]  They are very judicious and slow.
[00:35:02]  They don't make big decisions, but faced with this bloody war, this admittance to pay the 2% immediately and to stop the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, both absolute policies of Merkel, to change on a dime like that is an admittance that Merkel.

=== Merkelism Returns to Policy (13:20) ===

[00:35:22]  Literally brought them to the place where Germany and Europe are less secure and people couldn't no longer face that reality.
[00:35:31]  They had to make a change in policy.
[00:35:33]  It's a huge moment.
[00:35:34]  It's huge.
[00:35:36]  You know, back on the subject of Poland before we leave that though, if so Poland is in NATO.
[00:35:41]  So if Poland sends jets to create just to help or to create a no fly zone and then finds itself embattled in a war with Russia, right?
[00:35:52]  If Russia starts bombing Poland or doing something militarily to Poland.
[00:35:56]  Then we do have to get involved.
[00:35:57]  I mean, like, this is fraught.
[00:35:58]  If Poland, I know you say they're stepping it up, but we have to watch that very carefully, do we not?
[00:36:04]  For sure.
[00:36:04]  Every day we recommit our obligation to go in and step in if Poland.
[00:36:08]  If Putin and a NATO country get into it?
[00:36:12]  Yeah, look, I have a lot of thoughts here.
[00:36:15]  First of all, I think that you're right.
[00:36:17]  Although Poland is acting as a member of Europe, maybe not even the EU, but just as a member of Europe, and they're defending European land and sovereignty, they also have a dual hat as a NATO member.
[00:36:37]  And the slippery slope, Of them getting entangled in something with the Russians would trigger Article 5.
[00:36:45]  Now, I'm an ambassador and a diplomat and try not to talk about the military aspect because I actually believe that our diplomats should be really tough and utilizing all the tools and that we should be there until there's absolutely no more help left.
[00:37:02]  And I'm all for tough diplomacy.
[00:37:04]  That's what's been so frustrating with the Biden administration we haven't utilized all the tools that we should have been using.
[00:37:12]  From the beginning, we waited for a bloody war, despite the fact that the intelligence clearly showed Joe Biden that a bloody war was coming on Wednesday.
[00:37:20]  And he kept saying, A bloody war is coming on Wednesday, but failed to really act in a diplomatic way.
[00:37:26]  I think Poland is frustrated.
[00:37:28]  I think the Eastern Europeans are frustrated.
[00:37:30]  I just got back from the Balkans, and I can tell you there's a lot of fear in the Balkans as to what this means.
[00:37:36]  This is a slippery slope.
[00:37:38]  This war torn area is desperate for leadership.
[00:37:44]  Diplomatic leadership.
[00:37:45]  They want to avoid war at all costs.
[00:37:47]  And I think Putin sees that and is taking advantage of that.
[00:37:54]  Just back home for a second, because the number of people who are now pushing, like in Congress, we've talked in the first hour about how these Democrats in the House, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer over in the Senate, Dick Durbin in the Senate, they're rushing to back the effort to sanction Russia even further and shut down the oil imports.
[00:38:12]  And apparently, Joe Biden, according to again Fox News and the New York Times, rushed out this morning to try to, you know, Say, we're doing that because the Democrats were getting ready to look tough without him.
[00:38:22]  And I guess he personally even called Nancy Pelosi to say, please don't do this.
[00:38:26]  And she was like, we're doing it.
[00:38:28]  So there's people are getting worried now about do we look weak?
[00:38:33]  Are we doing all we can?
[00:38:35]  And you have been jumping up and down saying, could you just please spare me this whole act?
[00:38:41]  Because you guys are the ones who refused to shut down Nord Stream 2.
[00:38:47]  It was shut down.
[00:38:48]  Under Trump, with you, when you were there.
[00:38:51]  One of the first things they did was to fire it back up and re empower Putin in that way.
[00:38:56]  And now, when asked about that by a couple of reporters here or there, the Democrats, the White House, what they say is, we needed to reestablish the diplomatic ties to Europe and Germany that Trump had so badly frayed, i.e., refer back to comments like, you need to pay your fair share, right?
[00:39:17]  Like this cyclical argument, right?
[00:39:19]  Like he tried to call them out.
[00:39:21]  The Democrats said that was terrible what he did.
[00:39:24]  He tried to shut down the Nord Stream 2.
[00:39:26]  The Democrats fired it up, saying we had to make nice, nice with him because you upset them.
[00:39:30]  Now the Germans themselves have admitted both of those policies Trump didn't like were wrong.
[00:39:35]  Bingo.
[00:39:35]  They've reversed themselves on it.
[00:39:37]  And now the Democrats are running to sanction the very insane, and they want credit.
[00:39:43]  They want political credit for it, Rick.
[00:39:46]  They started a fire.
[00:39:47]  They called the fire department, and now they want credit.
[00:39:49]  Look, the.
[00:39:52]  You cannot talk about this issue without really getting philosophical on the difference between Trump and Biden.
[00:40:00]  And I thought long and hard, I've written long pieces on this.
[00:40:04]  The opposite of America First is consensus with the Europeans.
[00:40:08]  And Joe Biden told us that he valued applause and gratitude from the Europeans, this unity with the Europeans.
[00:40:17]  And diplomacy is back.
[00:40:20]  Remember that?
[00:40:21]  All of these discussions were a way to say, America first is not good for our allies.
[00:40:27]  We need to have consensus.
[00:40:29]  And as soon as that was uttered, the Germans under Chancellor Merkel jumped to say, Yeah, Joe, let's have consensus.
[00:40:38]  Let's drop the sanctions on Nord Stream 2.
[00:40:41]  And so they did that because the Germans successfully watered down our US policy.
[00:40:48]  The German government lobbied Senate Democrats.
[00:40:52]  The German ambassador, Emily Haber, went to Capitol Hill to talk to Democratic senators.
[00:40:58]  You have Democratic senators like Chris Murphy who said, you know, we have to drop these sanctions because we need unity.
[00:41:07]  The spin was we don't want to make Putin mad by having these sanctions on him.
[00:41:16]  So, the strategy was to please the Germans, they dropped the sanctions.
[00:41:22]  Now, they've missed two things.
[00:41:24]  The Democrats are defining Europe by Berlin and Paris.
[00:41:29]  And as you can see from Warsaw and from some other countries, you cannot do that.
[00:41:34]  The EU is a different entity today than it was even five years ago.
[00:41:40]  Remember, Brexit happened because Chancellor Merkel refused to enforce immigration laws, allowed Syrian and Libyan Refugees to come in without rules.
[00:41:51]  And the British were like, wait a minute, we can't have that.
[00:41:55]  So the Brexit happened because of Merkel's policies.
[00:41:59]  This is where we get into Merkelism again.
[00:42:01]  Then what you have is when Merkel was done with office and Olaf Scholz came in and the socialists, they flipped the script on Nord Stream 2 sanctions and defense spending.
[00:42:17]  But our Democrat friends here in America didn't.
[00:42:21]  See the change.
[00:42:23]  They're still with the Merkel way.
[00:42:25]  They're still trying to pretend like they were tough.
[00:42:28]  But as you point out, they dropped the sanctions.
[00:42:31]  They created this mess.
[00:42:32]  And I think that when Putin saw Merkel being done, he had great relations with Merkel.
[00:42:39]  And when he saw Merkel done, and then he saw an opening of, like, well, now I can take advantage of the socialists and the Democrats in Washington are with me, that empowered him to move.
[00:42:51]  What he missed is.
[00:42:53]  The incredible, I think we all missed the incredible flip flop that the Germans did so fast.
[00:42:58]  Putin missed it and Senate Democrats missed it.
[00:43:01]  But now I think Biden is scrambling.
[00:43:04]  He's abandoning consensus with the Europeans because the Europeans have said, we're not going along with you to stop buying Russian oil.
[00:43:13]  We're not ready.
[00:43:14]  We still are under the Merkel policies of getting rid, just as Schellenberg was saying, getting rid of nuclear energy, getting rid of coal.
[00:43:23]  And by the way, Merkel did all of that because.
[00:43:26]  She was beginning to lose power to the Green Party.
[00:43:30]  Now, the Green Party in Germany is different than what we would think a Green Party would be in America.
[00:43:35]  Think of the Green Party as soccer moms from Frankfurt, wealthy individuals who really care about quality of life issues.
[00:43:44]  And so the Green Party was rising and they were taking votes from Merkel, and she was about ready to do something about it.
[00:43:52]  All right, let me, I got to get this in.
[00:43:54]  Now we're going to fix it.
[00:43:55]  We're going to fix the 7% loss of oil imports by going to Saudi Arabia.
[00:44:00]  By going to Venezuela?
[00:44:02]  Your thoughts on that?
[00:44:04]  Yeah, look, just the basic supply and demand issue is that.
[00:44:08]  We have to supply.
[00:44:09]  We can't go get the supply from somebody else.
[00:44:11]  We have the ability to do it.
[00:44:13]  Donald Trump showed us that we can be an energy exporter, a dramatic turnaround, a dominance in the energy field.
[00:44:22]  We have to go back and do that.
[00:44:24]  I don't understand why the environmentalists in America are taking that off the table because they clearly are.
[00:44:30]  And somehow they don't look at Venezuela, Iran, Russian oil as something that's dirty.
[00:44:37]  They just look at ours as dirty.
[00:44:39]  Yes, that's exactly it.
[00:44:41]  I got 20 seconds left.
[00:44:43]  Can I just get a quick thought on the Iran deal and how that plays into all of this?
[00:44:46]  And I'll give you 30.
[00:44:47]  I got 30 seconds.
[00:44:48]  We're trusting the Russians.
[00:44:50]  We're cutting a deal.
[00:44:51]  One of the reasons we haven't been tough on the Russians, tough enough in Ukraine, is because we need them in Iran.
[00:44:56]  They're cutting the deal.
[00:44:59]  By the way, the Russians are leading in Syria on this policy.
[00:45:03]  When you think about diplomacy, you're giving in one area and getting in another, and all of these issues together.
[00:45:10]  The Russian hand is strong against the Biden administration.
[00:45:13]  It's crazy how we're still dealing with them.
[00:45:15]  You know, we're still buying their oil and we're still dealing with them on this Iran deal.
[00:45:18]  Meanwhile, we're trying to look tough on the world stage by saying, okay, you know, we're going to cut off whatever and we're going to cut this off and we're going to stop the 7% oil imports.
[00:45:26]  But again, through the back door, it's a very different looking relationship.
[00:45:29]  Beating the beast.
[00:45:31]  Yeah.
[00:45:31]  And there's who knows whether that can even be undone given how close we've, you know, we've been with China, with Russia all over all these years.
[00:45:39]  Rick Grinnell, no one better than you.
[00:45:41]  Thank you so much for being on today with your insights.
[00:45:43]  Always fun.
[00:45:44]  Thanks, Megan.
[00:45:46]  All right.
[00:45:46]  So, we're going to talk about the difference, right?
[00:45:48]  Like, what helped turn Germany around, as Rick was saying?
[00:45:51]  Well, one of the factors is absolutely Zelensky and the huge, huge role he's had in changing public sentiment about Ukraine and its abilities with respect to this battle.
[00:46:04]  Win or lose, he's won the hearts of a lot of people around the globe.
[00:46:07]  We'll dig into that in just a little bit.
[00:46:10]  Don't go away.
[00:46:20]  Well, apparently, one of the things that Joe Biden said this morning when addressing this crisis was not to worry because he's going to be sending the vice president to Poland and Romania.
[00:46:42]  So she's going to solve this problem, I guess, the way she solved the southern border immigration problem.
[00:46:48]  In case you don't think she's up to the job, you just listen to her addressing the subject of energy and how that is affecting us today.
[00:46:57]  Imagine a future the freight trucks that deliver bread and milk to our grocery store shelves, and the buses that take children to school and parents to work.
[00:47:08]  Imagine all the heavy duty vehicles that keep our supply lines strong and allow our economy to grow.
[00:47:16]  Imagine that they produced zero emissions.
[00:47:23]  Well, you all imagined it.
[00:47:25]  That's why we're here today.
[00:47:27]  We are also announcing funding for, yes, one of my favorite topics electric school buses.
[00:47:35]  Okay, so I feel better.
[00:47:37]  I don't know about you, but we're going to focus on those electric school buses.
[00:47:41]  This is yesterday she was addressing some green energy group.
[00:47:45]  That's where our focus is green energy, Greta Turnberg, renewables, to the exclusion of all else.
[00:47:51]  Our own energy independence, our own very rich oil and natural gas reserves, the fracking that we can do, the pumping that we can do.
[00:47:59]  We don't want to do it.
[00:48:00]  We'd rather buy from Venezuela.
[00:48:02]  We'd rather buy from the Saudis.
[00:48:04]  Remember all that shit Phil Mickelson got?
[00:48:06]  Oh, I swore again.
[00:48:07]  Crap, he got for wanting to join the Saudi Golf League.
[00:48:11]  Well, what about us?
[00:48:12]  We want to join the Saudi Oil League even more than we have.
[00:48:16]  We're going to come back with John Daniel Davidson.
[00:48:19]  He's from the Federalist.
[00:48:20]  He's been doing great work on this, has a different perspective, and we'll dig into that in just a minute.
[00:48:28]  All the enemies of the world are very upmarksome, and we're going to be able to get all the people in the same way.
[00:48:35]  Look at this, and we're going to be very upmarksome.

=== Impeachment and Political Messages (03:39) ===

[00:48:42]  Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.
[00:48:52]  Welcome back to the Megyn Kelly Show.
[00:48:54]  The date June 12, 1987.
[00:48:57]  Then President Ronald Reagan at the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin, Germany, delivering that famous demand to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
[00:49:06]  Today, some 800 miles away, we see another actor turned politician taking on Russia.
[00:49:13]  Fighting to save his own country.
[00:49:15]  Late yesterday, a defiant President Zelensky posted a video on social media giving his exact location.
[00:49:22]  He showed off the darkened streets of Kiev, saying, Not hiding, I'm not afraid of anyone.
[00:49:28]  Then he sat down at the desk in his presidential office to deliver what are becoming trademark messages to the world.
[00:49:36]  He's just 44 years old, and Volodymyr Zelensky has captivated hearts and minds across the globe with these messages.
[00:49:44]  So, who is he?
[00:49:45]  Well, he was born to Jewish parents in southern Ukraine.
[00:49:48]  Zelensky's first language was actually Russian, though he is fluent in Ukrainian too.
[00:49:53]  A stint in university led to law school, but a legal career was not meant to be for him.
[00:49:59]  Instead, he became involved in theater, in comedy, later co founding Ukraine's most successful entertainment studio.
[00:50:08]  In 2006, he would compete on the Ukrainian version of Dancing with the Stars, and he was amazing.
[00:50:14]  He actually won.
[00:50:15]  Watch some of this.
[00:50:26]  Okay, and for those of you listening and not watching this, he was in a completely hot pink suit, moving the hips like Elvis Presley would have been proud.
[00:50:35]  Just recently, British actor Hugh Bonneville outed Zelensky as the familiar voice behind the Peruvian bear in the Ukrainian versions of Paddington and Paddington 2.
[00:50:47]  Listen.
[00:50:57]  Now you kind of know his voice, right?
[00:50:59]  Now it sounds familiar.
[00:51:01]  But the closest he came to politics before actually becoming a politician was on a show called Servant of the People, a comedy series he starred in, hugely successful, about a teacher who becomes president after a video of him ranting about politics.
[00:51:18]  Goes viral.
[00:51:19]  The name of that show is actually what Zelensky later decided to name his real political party when he ran for president of Ukraine.
[00:51:27]  In a way, not unlike Trump, just out of nowhere when it comes to politics, at least, going from civilian to, but celebrity to politician overnight, seemingly.
[00:51:37]  On April 21st, 2019, he was elected in a landslide victory over the incumbent, Petro Poroshenko.
[00:51:44]  And in September of that same year, he found himself at the center of an international scandal when a whistleblower.
[00:51:51]  Quote unquote whistleblower complained that President Trump had, among other things, asked Zelensky to look into the Biden family's ties to a Ukrainian energy conglomerate.
[00:52:03]  You remember that, Trump?
[00:52:04]  It was a perfect phone call, a perfect phone call.
[00:52:06]  This guy was on the other end of it.
[00:52:08]  That call served as the basis for the House impeachment of then President Trump.
[00:52:14]  But that was the first impeachment.
[00:52:15]  The second impeachment came after January.
[00:52:17]  So you can't keep track of the number of times they tried to get Trump, but that was the first one.

=== History Leading to This Point (15:15) ===

[00:52:22]  In the years that followed, Zelensky would frequently sit down with world leaders and advocate on behalf of his people.
[00:52:28]  Now he is facing the biggest challenge of his life, as are his countrymen.
[00:52:32]  He remains steadfast in his resolve.
[00:52:35]  He frequently posts uplifting messages to his people.
[00:52:38]  He refuses efforts to save himself.
[00:52:42]  Famously telling the United States, I need ammunition, not a ride.
[00:52:46]  There was a question about whether that actually happened.
[00:52:48]  That's been confirmed since by Zelensky himself.
[00:52:52]  His wife of nearly 20 years, the mother of his young children, echoing the same sentiment, writing on her own Instagram, I will not panic and cry.
[00:53:01]  I will be calm and confident.
[00:53:03]  My children are watching me.
[00:53:05]  I will be next to them and next to my husband and with you.
[00:53:09]  I love you.
[00:53:11]  I love Ukraine.
[00:53:13]  Joining me now, John Daniel Davidson, senior editor at The Federalist, and somebody I've been listening to in coverage of this for a different perspective.
[00:53:22]  And that's what we try to bring here.
[00:53:24]  There's no point of view that's right on this.
[00:53:27]  We're still trying to figure out how to process what's happening in Ukraine and what it means for us, never mind the free world.
[00:53:33]  John, thanks so much for being here.
[00:53:35]  Thanks for having me.
[00:53:37]  You know, Zelensky has proven to be an inspiring figure, that's for sure.
[00:53:42]  You know, the guy won't back down.
[00:53:44]  Everybody thought he would cut tail and run.
[00:53:46]  I mean, that's sort of what these leaders do in these weaker countries.
[00:53:49]  When a bigger country like Russia comes in, they tuck tail and they run.
[00:53:53]  They save their own skin.
[00:53:55]  And the fact that this guy hasn't done that, I do think, has changed this war.
[00:54:00]  It doesn't necessarily mean Ukraine wins it, but it's certainly changed what's happening globally right now, don't you think?
[00:54:07]  Yeah.
[00:54:07]  The Russian battle plan was sort of predicated on the assumption that Zelensky and his government would sort of run, flee the country, that the The apparatus of the Ukrainian state would sort of dissolve within 48 hours.
[00:54:21]  And we know that from some of these articles that were accidentally published in Russian that were dated the 26th of February, talking about sort of the post war Russian vision for Ukraine.
[00:54:37]  And as we know, that was 48 hours after the invasion.
[00:54:41]  So I think a lot of the Russian tactical assumptions were that.
[00:54:48]  The Ukrainian state wasn't really robust.
[00:54:51]  It wasn't really real in a sense, and that it would evaporate as soon as Russian forces crossed the border.
[00:55:00]  And I think that's something that Putin was sort of banking on.
[00:55:05]  It hasn't happened.
[00:55:06]  Not only has the state not evaporated, but the Russian or the Ukrainian armed forces have proven a lot more capable and a lot tougher of an opponent.
[00:55:17]  Than I think Moscow thought they would be.
[00:55:20]  Yeah.
[00:55:21]  They have the resolve.
[00:55:22]  We have the weaponry, which we've been sending to them, we among other countries in Europe, and they're making the most out of it.
[00:55:28]  But the civilian death toll being what it is, the two million people fleeing the country, and who could blame them?
[00:55:34]  I mean, these women and children trying to get out of there, save their lives.
[00:55:37]  And Putin's forces are killing Ukrainians pretty indiscriminately.
[00:55:43]  Now, you do have to be careful of the propaganda war in anything like this.
[00:55:46]  But we've got independent New York Times.
[00:55:49]  Reporters out there photographing the murder of civilians by Putin's troops.
[00:55:54]  It's definitely happening.
[00:55:55]  And even Putin's own countrymen back at home, to the extent they can get information, because he's shut down all non state run media inside Russia.
[00:56:05]  I mean, if you're getting your info from Inside Russia, you're getting Putin's messaging.
[00:56:10]  But still, we're seeing thousands of Russians take to the street, get arrested for protesting, which you're not allowed to do there.
[00:56:16]  And those who aren't doing that may be under the spell of, oh, he's fighting Nazism inside Ukraine, which is apparently what indeed you'll see some uncertain blogs that have been posted by the Russians.
[00:56:28]  They're buying his, the ones who aren't protesting are buying his narrative that he's got to oust the Nazis from Ukraine, including Zelensky, who himself is a Jewish guy.
[00:56:38]  But okay.
[00:56:40]  Yeah, I mean, one of the things that we've seen compared to Russia's kind of disinformation propaganda effort in this war, Ukraine is winning the propaganda and information war hands down.
[00:56:51]  They've shown themselves to be very sophisticated, really, in information warfare.
[00:56:57]  And, you know, that's not to say that we should just uncritically accept everything that we hear from the Ukrainian government or hear from Ukrainian media.
[00:57:11]  Certainly early on, there were several stories, kind of these hero just so stories about the soldiers on Snake Island saying F you to the Russians before they were all killed.
[00:57:23]  And that turned out not to be quite true.
[00:57:24]  Or the ghost of Kiev, the pilot who had shot down half a dozen Russian MiGs, that turned out not to quite be true either.
[00:57:32]  But certainly, Ukraine has shown itself robust on all these different fronts, right?
[00:57:37]  The resiliency of the state in President Zelensky, the The toughness of the armed forces and the sort of just the battlefield capabilities of the Ukrainian armed forces.
[00:57:48]  And then also the disinformation and sort of information and propaganda warfare aspect of Ukraine has, it's like Russia's not even trying on that front.
[00:58:00]  There was the speech from Putin saying we're going to denazify Ukraine, which is sort of an obvious and kind of a laughable line that's a pretext.
[00:58:11]  It's not really why they're doing this.
[00:58:14]  But on every measure, Ukraine has shown this resilience and this toughness, I think, that a lot of people, especially in the West, did not expect.
[00:58:22]  And for good reason Ukraine is famously corrupt, just like Russia is famously corrupt.
[00:58:29]  And famously corrupt nations tend not to be resilient in situations like this.
[00:58:34]  Well, that's how Zelensky got elected.
[00:58:36]  I mean, he ran on a platform of anti corruption.
[00:58:39]  He's like, I'm just a damn actor.
[00:58:41]  Put me in there, I'll try to clean it up.
[00:58:44]  And so there's an appetite for doing that amongst the populace in Ukraine.
[00:58:48]  Once again, you know, the regular citizens get screwed, and the people at the top, the politicians who got Ukraine, you know, into this sort of relationship where they are corrupt and they've been a little too cozy with the wrong people, they won't be held to account.
[00:59:02]  But okay, so let's shift gears and ask about what you think got us here.
[00:59:07]  Like, and again, I just want to reiterate being honest about what got us here doesn't mean blaming anybody other than Russia.
[00:59:13]  We all know who invaded Ukraine, we all know it was wrong, morally wrong.
[00:59:18]  And should be condemned.
[00:59:19]  And we all pray it stops as soon as humanly possible.
[00:59:23]  But we should be honest about what led up to this and what lessons can we glean?
[00:59:29]  Yeah, you're absolutely right.
[00:59:30]  We have to get beyond the, you know, Putin is a bad guy, Ukraine is the good guy.
[00:59:35]  We have to get beyond that.
[00:59:36]  And by the way, you know, the online environment for this has been terrible.
[00:59:42]  It's as though if you assign, you know, if you conduct any analysis that goes back more than, you know, a few weeks, About what caused this crisis, you get accused of being a Putin apologist or a Putin sympathizer, which is just not true at all.
[00:59:56]  There's a long history of what led us to this point.
[00:59:59]  And I think if you go back and you look at the United States and its European allies and the steps that have been taken going back to the 90s, You know, Ukraine was a kind of time bomb waiting to explode ever since the creation of Ukraine in the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
[01:00:21]  There has been a problem, sort of a geopolitical problem, with Ukraine having the borders it does, having the territory it does, positioned as it is between Eastern Europe and Russia.
[01:00:32]  It's a kind of buffer state, and it's not a situation that.
[01:00:38]  Ever was going to be stable in the long term.
[01:00:40]  A lot of people don't realize, like the situation with the Crimea.
[01:00:44]  Why is Crimea important to Russia?
[01:00:46]  That's the location of their Black Sea fleet in Sevastopol.
[01:00:50]  That's the access, the one access point that Russia has to the Black Sea and through the Dardanelles to the Mediterranean.
[01:00:56]  It's a vitally important geostrategic location.
[01:00:59]  Any regime in Moscow, Putin, or anyone else would see a vital strategic interest in holding on to Crimea.
[01:01:06]  But the idea that the settlement in the mid 1990s, whereby Ukraine would lease Sevastopol to Russia for like 20 year increments was never like a durable long term solution, especially if Ukraine ever turned strategically and economically toward Europe, toward Western Europe.
[01:01:28]  That's not something Russia was ever going to allow to happen because of how Russia perceives its core interests.
[01:01:32]  Now, this is the point usually where people say, well, you know, why are you making excuses for Russia?
[01:01:38]  It's not making excuses for Russia to try to understand Russian motivations and what Russia sees.
[01:01:43]  As it's called.
[01:01:44]  That's so obvious.
[01:01:46]  People just have their agendas.
[01:01:47]  I'm fascinated by this.
[01:01:48]  I do want to understand.
[01:01:50]  I mean, how are we ever going to avoid these sort of diplomatic atrocities in the future if we don't figure out did we underestimate him?
[01:01:58]  Did we not take his saber rattling seriously?
[01:02:00]  Did we do anything provocative?
[01:02:03]  And if so, maybe we did, but I mean, maybe that's just life.
[01:02:07]  I mean, us existing is provocative to Putin as well as us existing is provocative.
[01:02:13]  Yeah.
[01:02:14]  To Putin, right.
[01:02:15]  Okay, so keep going.
[01:02:16]  So that was never going to exist.
[01:02:17]  And Ukraine, it's not America.
[01:02:20]  It's not this big free country with a bunch of very strong GDP and oceans on the left and the right, and sort of doesn't have to worry as much about its neighbors.
[01:02:31]  That's right.
[01:02:31]  And in fact, its current territorial configuration was created by Nikita Khrushchev in 1954 as a way for the Soviet Union to have more states at the UN that were part of the Warsaw Pact.
[01:02:45]  So there is a kind of.
[01:02:48]  Historical iterative process that has created modern day Ukraine with these borders that are not quite tenable.
[01:02:57]  They don't make sense, right?
[01:02:59]  It doesn't make sense that Crimea would be part of Ukraine.
[01:03:02]  And yet, through the fall of the Soviet Union and the collapse of communism, that's what happened.
[01:03:09]  That's what's going to need to be adjudicated or settled at some point.
[01:03:13]  And one of the ways that we have ignored that.
[01:03:18]  And not taking it seriously is by encouraging the Ukrainian government to maintain this claim on Crimea.
[01:03:27]  I think a responsible US leadership would have, a long time ago, during the Obama administration in 2014, after the Orange Revolution in Ukraine and Russia's annexation of Crimea, would have gone to the Ukrainian leadership and said, look, we need to figure this out.
[01:03:46]  The continued claim of Ukrainian sovereignty over Crimea.
[01:03:50]  Is a recipe for a war.
[01:03:52]  And so we need to figure out a negotiated settlement so that we solve this problem before it turns into what we have now.
[01:03:58]  The Obama administration didn't do it.
[01:04:00]  Trump administration didn't do it.
[01:04:01]  The Biden administration didn't do it.
[01:04:03]  And now we're at war.
[01:04:05]  And it's a war that.
[01:04:06]  Anyone who looked at a map and understood the history could see what was coming sooner or later.
[01:04:11]  Okay, so what do you think about the notion that that would not have appeased him?
[01:04:17]  You know, that the hungry fox is not sated by one chicken.
[01:04:23]  And that really what he wants is Ukraine to be part of Russia.
[01:04:30]  He wants to eat it, he wants to swallow it.
[01:04:32]  And what he's angry about is that Ukraine, which is an independent country, Don't want that.
[01:04:38]  They actually have grown closer to the West.
[01:04:41]  They're pro democracy and they've found the Western way of life to be appealing.
[01:04:45]  And they've kind of turned the cold shoulder to him, leaving him, forgive my pedestrian analogies, but he's sort of like the boyfriend who got dumped, who's like, but I still want to be with you.
[01:04:56]  And Ukraine's looking over at us like, well, I kind of like this one now.
[01:05:00]  This is actually more attractive to me.
[01:05:02]  And he's behaving badly to take it down to the very basic analogy one can do.
[01:05:07]  Sure.
[01:05:07]  No, absolutely.
[01:05:08]  You're absolutely right.
[01:05:09]  But even there, what you just described, you start to see the outlines of a possible negotiated settlement.
[01:05:15]  Just because Putin doesn't get everything that he wants, maybe he gets what he needs and some of what he wants.
[01:05:22]  And maybe Ukraine gets what they need and some of what they want.
[01:05:25]  Nobody's going to be happy.
[01:05:27]  But by entering into a negotiation, a serious negotiation process, long before we got to this point, there may have been an outline of a settlement where Ukraine got political independence and it was free to turn toward.
[01:05:41]  Europe and to make trade deals with the EU.
[01:05:44]  But it sacrificed some of its territory to do that.
[01:05:49]  And there was an exchange there and a back and forth.
[01:05:52]  And look, we can be tough with Putin and we could have been tough with Putin about this and said, look, you'll get Crimea and maybe you'll get these areas in eastern Ukraine as well.
[01:06:02]  And in exchange for that, you relinquish any claim to sort of have influence over Ukraine or keep Ukraine in your orbit, and they are free to go their way.
[01:06:13]  The outlines of a settlement you can see if anyone in the West had taken that seriously and had anyone taken seriously Russia's view of the situation.
[01:06:23]  And I don't think they did, which instead you got this sort of feckless and inconsistent US policy where the Obama administration wouldn't arm the Ukrainians and the Trump administration did.
[01:06:36]  And then the Biden administration eased up sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.
[01:06:41]  We've had a strategic mess.
[01:06:44]  In our approach to this situation and our approach to Russia over the past decades.
[01:06:49]  And I think all of that has contributed to the war now.
[01:06:52]  And again, that's not to say the United States is responsible for the war, Putin is, but it is to say that the war represents a strategic failure on the part of the United States.
[01:07:03]  If we had done that, what would have stopped his ire once what was left of Ukraine, which would still be the bulk of Ukraine, said, now we're going to join NATO.
[01:07:13]  Now we want to be part of the EU and we're going to join NATO.
[01:07:17]  Well, part of that negotiation in offering territory for independence could have been some security guarantee to Ukraine.
[01:07:26]  I doubt Ukraine would have agreed of their own volition to relinquish significant amounts of territory without some sort of security guarantees for the West.
[01:07:34]  And that could have been a part of it.

=== Strategic Diplomatic Approaches (09:29) ===

[01:07:37]  It's no use, though.
[01:07:39]  Russia's concerns about NATO, I often hear in response, sort of from Western media, it's like, well, NATO is a defensive treaty.
[01:07:47]  We're not a threat to Russia.
[01:07:48]  It's just a sort of propaganda that.
[01:07:50]  Putin is saying that NATO is a threat to Russia.
[01:07:53]  Putin does see NATO as a threat to Russia.
[01:07:56]  Whether or not NATO really is a threat to Russia is almost beside the point.
[01:08:00]  And so we have to come up with a diplomatic and strategic approach that takes that into account.
[01:08:07]  And tries to mitigate Russian fears about NATO.
[01:08:11]  And instead of saying, well, Putin is never going to accept a Ukraine that's oriented toward Europe, we should have tried to find a way in which Russia could accept a reduced Ukraine that may be oriented toward Europe in exchange for something very valuable that we would all agree Russia could keep forever, like Crimea in the Donbas and maybe some other areas.
[01:08:37]  But I don't think that these discussions.
[01:08:40]  Or even this way of thinking ever entered into the calculus in Washington because we don't have very serious people who are in charge of US foreign policy and we haven't for some time.
[01:08:51]  My God, that's true.
[01:08:52]  That's one of the saddest things of the past 10 years is just the, but also most important, just the unveiling of our leaders as not having one clue what they're doing.
[01:09:03]  And really, I mean, you'll see that in the quieter moments if you get to know any of them that they're just, I mean, these politicians are just like you.
[01:09:09]  They're just like me.
[01:09:10]  They don't know what they're doing, they're figuring it out as they go along.
[01:09:13]  And it's It's showing, right?
[01:09:16]  The net effect of 10 years plus is showing in Ukraine.
[01:09:21]  All right, so that still leaves us with where we are now and what to do now.
[01:09:24]  And I know you've been somewhat critical of the quote maximalist approach that we're taking.
[01:09:31]  This as support inside our country for creating a no fly zone grows.
[01:09:37]  Depends on how you ask the question, John would say, but we'll pick it up right there after squeezing in a quick break.
[01:09:48]  So, John, support grows, according to the polls within the United States, for the creation of a no fly zone over Ukraine, which is exactly what Zelensky has been begging NATO and the free world for so far.
[01:10:04]  Other than Poland, that I guess just today said, well, you know, maybe we should send some, should we send some planes?
[01:10:10]  Should we, they haven't committed, but there was just a little bit of a waiver.
[01:10:14]  Everyone else has said that's not happening.
[01:10:17]  You've got some thoughts on, on, Whether people fully understand what a no fly zone means.
[01:10:23]  Yeah, I don't think they do.
[01:10:25]  I think that's reflected in the polling.
[01:10:28]  I mentioned on Twitter the other day if the pollsters changed the question from, Do you support the US and NATO allies imposing a no fly zone over Ukraine, to Do you support the US and NATO allies going to war with Russia using warplanes?
[01:10:42]  I don't think you would see the same kind of support that the polls are showing now.
[01:10:46]  But that is what we're talking about when we talk about a no fly zone.
[01:10:49]  It means NATO.
[01:10:51]  Warplanes shooting, engaging, and shooting down any Russian warplanes they find in the skies over Ukraine.
[01:10:58]  That's what a no fly zone is.
[01:11:01]  And I think that we are, the media, I should say, is doing a disservice to put out these sort of misleading polls or these polls that, if you drill into the polls, they're not doing a very good job of getting clear answers from the people that are being surveyed.
[01:11:20]  So, I think we need to be clear about what a no fly zone is.
[01:11:24]  It means engaging Russian warplanes and shooting them down.
[01:11:28]  And Russia, Putin has said that he'll consider anything like that.
[01:11:35]  He'll consider the country doing it to be a party to the war, to be a belligerent, and he'll respond.
[01:11:42]  I mean, up until this morning, we wouldn't even turn off the spigot of Russian oil.
[01:11:49]  So, like, we're going to keep taking their oil, but we're going to send our guys up there and the fighter jets.
[01:11:55]  And risk their lives shooting down Russians?
[01:11:57]  Like, what is our policy?
[01:12:00]  Where do we stand?
[01:12:01]  And the Europeans, too, they're so dependent on Russia.
[01:12:04]  They're not going to send their fighter jets up there while they're getting 40% of their gas from Putin.
[01:12:09]  Yeah.
[01:12:10]  And what's the end game, right?
[01:12:12]  Like, how do we think this is going to end?
[01:12:13]  What happens when a US pilot gets shot down over Ukraine by a Russian fighter jet?
[01:12:20]  Again, going back to this, it's all very reactive.
[01:12:23]  It's all, it's quite emotional, the stuff that's coming from our leaders and the stuff that's coming from our media.
[01:12:31]  And I don't think it's, it doesn't, Show that they've really thought through these things, like a no fly zone or like an oil embargo or these sanctions that are designed to basically just crater the Russian economy and turn Russia into sort of an international pariah on a permanent basis.
[01:12:53]  I don't see anything like strategy behind the decisions that are being made or even the discussions that the US and the allies are having in public.
[01:13:03]  And that's evidenced by the What you just mentioned, Biden's decision today to sanction Russian oil imports, which he had resisted up until five minutes ago.
[01:13:17]  What about that?
[01:13:18]  Because I know what happened with Visa and MasterCard.
[01:13:22]  Are they no longer doing business in Russia?
[01:13:24]  Because I know you had something where you were saying, be careful before you start cheering for this kind of thing.
[01:13:31]  Why?
[01:13:31]  Explain that.
[01:13:32]  Because I do think the knee jerk instinct was when the bully picks on the weak kid on the playground.
[01:13:38]  Let's all alienate the bully.
[01:13:40]  The bully will have no friends.
[01:13:41]  The bully will sit by himself until he learns not to be a bully anymore.
[01:13:45]  I think we need to be careful about cheering on these multinational corporations that decide that they are going to cut off parts of the world or cut off certain kinds of people from their services.
[01:14:01]  You know, whether it's Russians, like the entire Russian people, because, you know, decisions that their leaders have made about invading Ukraine.
[01:14:11]  It's easy to see what the next step is, right?
[01:14:14]  And we already, right before the war in Ukraine and the Russian invasion, we saw Canada take extraordinary steps to financially punish protesters who held views that Justin Trudeau thought were unacceptable.
[01:14:27]  So it's very easy to see a future in which multinational, very powerful corporations like Visa and MasterCard or Google decide that there are certain people whose opinions render them.
[01:14:45]  You know, outcasts and they are going to be like if the behavior is bad enough, if the behavior is bad enough, we have a corporate responsibility to step in and cut them off.
[01:14:53]  And not to compare domestic protests to what Vladimir Putin's doing, but you're doing the slippery slope argument.
[01:15:01]  Well, yes, because these corporations do wield an enormous amount of power and we've seen them willing to engage in sort of what the Supreme Court would call viewpoint discrimination, right?
[01:15:13]  Not just with respect to Russia, but it's, but I mean, imagine, um, The 2024 presidential election.
[01:15:19]  Donald Trump decides to run.
[01:15:21]  Let's say he loses.
[01:15:22]  Let's say he then says some crazy stuff about why he lost.
[01:15:26]  And let's say you have a Facebook account or a Twitter account and you like or retweet something crazy that Trump said.
[01:15:34]  And all of a sudden you go to access your bank account and Wells Fargo or Visa has frozen your account because you've expressed unacceptable views.
[01:15:43]  That's not hard to imagine at all in the world that we live in right now.
[01:15:47]  And it should terrify everybody.
[01:15:49]  Mm hmm.
[01:15:50]  Well, didn't something, again, we're down a lane here, but who banned Michelle Malkin just recently from renting?
[01:15:59]  It wasn't Airbnb.
[01:16:03]  Airbnb.
[01:16:05]  Banned Michelle Malkin from renting, so she says, she and I guess her husband, because she has an association with this guy who they say is a white supremacist.
[01:16:17]  And she says he's not, but the group has been labeled one, but she's got an association they don't like.
[01:16:23]  And so she's not allowed to rent with Airbnb.
[01:16:27]  Now, I realize it's a free country and you can do business with whomever you want, but it's starting to happen.
[01:16:34]  I mean, that's an extraordinary move for a private company to just ban a public figure from ever using their.
[01:16:40]  Their product essentially because of her views.
[01:16:43]  I think we need to get away from this idea that these are private companies.
[01:16:47]  These, especially when we're talking about big tech, these are much more than private companies.
[01:16:51]  These are companies that are more powerful, I think, than anything we could have imagined even a generation ago.
[01:16:58]  And the idea that we, you know, it's just like, well, you know, if you don't like it, you know, build your own Twitter.
[01:17:02]  Well, look what happened to Parler when they tried to build their own Twitter.

=== Powerful Corporations and Tech (12:29) ===

[01:17:06]  So our lawmakers in Washington have got to get real about what we're facing.
[01:17:13]  With these multinational, extremely powerful corporations, especially our tech corporations and our financial tech corporations, and come up with ways to regulate their behavior and get strict with them so that they can't go around policing and imposing these sort of ideological tests on who they're going to give services to and who they're not going to give services to.
[01:17:38]  It's time to get real about this stuff because it's happening fast and we're way behind the curve.
[01:17:42]  Well, we also need to be careful about, like, I'm all in favor of.
[01:17:46]  Going after the oligarchs.
[01:17:47]  I really, I have no real, I couldn't really care less.
[01:17:51]  But things that are actually going to hurt the Russian people, you know, the citizenry, that bothers me.
[01:17:56]  I don't think the Russian people are for this war at all.
[01:17:59]  I've been there quite a bit over the past couple of years.
[01:18:02]  And the average Russian you meet on the street loves America.
[01:18:05]  And they say, oh, our leaders, you know, they mean ours and theirs.
[01:18:10]  You know, they're excited about America.
[01:18:12]  They like American, you know, whatever, fashion and they like movies and so on.
[01:18:17]  They don't have hatred in their hearts for America.
[01:18:19]  For the most part, you know, of course, there's always a pocket here or there.
[01:18:22]  And I don't think that they have hatred for Ukraine.
[01:18:25]  And I don't think that they want to see this battle.
[01:18:27]  In fact, most of them have family in Ukraine.
[01:18:29]  The two countries are very close.
[01:18:31]  So I worry about creating a new generation of enemies over there by absolutely devastating the country.
[01:18:37]  And so the longer this goes on, John, right, the more danger we're in of doing that.
[01:18:43]  And the more we're really going to be faced with some tough questions about how long we're willing to do this.
[01:18:50]  Yeah, it's not like the people of Russia voted for this war or voted for their leaders to your point.
[01:18:57]  Not really.
[01:18:58]  Yeah.
[01:18:59]  We do need to have an end state, a realistic end state, and figure out what is an end state that is acceptable to the United States and its allies, and what is an end state that might be acceptable to Ukraine and Russia, and what are the steps we need to take right now to start moving toward it.
[01:19:16]  Because the idea that we're just going to impose sanctions on Russia and we're going to, you know, Destroy the ruble and we're going to destroy the Russian economy.
[01:19:25]  And, you know, we just have to wait a couple months for that to happen.
[01:19:28]  Well, sorry, but in a couple months, Ukraine's going to be reduced to rubble.
[01:19:33]  So is that our strategy?
[01:19:34]  We're just going to let Russia reduce Ukraine to rubble and wait for the sanctions to, like, hurt the Russian economy and, you know, foment discontent among the Russian people for their leaders?
[01:19:46]  That doesn't sound like a strategy, a very serious strategy, and it doesn't sound like a successful one either.
[01:19:52]  I think that.
[01:19:53]  We need to be thinking on a more constricted time horizon.
[01:19:56]  We have a short amount of time to stop the fighting and enter into negotiations before we see horrific.
[01:20:05]  Civilian casualties and the mass destruction of civilian population centers in Ukraine.
[01:20:11]  And it seems like our leaders are just like living in a fantasy land.
[01:20:16]  It's a good point because the real question is to what end are all the sanctions?
[01:20:21]  You know, we're trying to amp up the pressure on Putin so that he folds.
[01:20:26]  That's what we want.
[01:20:27]  We want him to fold.
[01:20:27]  We want him to reevaluate this.
[01:20:29]  We want him to believe that it's unsustainable.
[01:20:31]  And there is a real question about whether we're underestimating Vladimir Putin.
[01:20:35]  Do we?
[01:20:36]  Do we understand?
[01:20:38]  He's not likely to do that anytime soon, especially if he's getting backdoor support from the Chinese and possibly from India with respect to his oil exports and so on.
[01:20:48]  It's not like he's cut off from all money.
[01:20:51]  So, what is the end game, right?
[01:20:52]  We can go over here, John, and we can change our little Twitter icons to Ukrainian flags, and these morons can dump their Dostoevsky into the garbage can and think that that does something stupid, stupid ass virtue signaling at every turn.
[01:21:06]  But what is the end game?
[01:21:08]  What is the plan?
[01:21:09]  Yeah, well, the Secretary of State Antony Blinken said recently, and I don't think that he was speaking in terms of like this is the well considered official policy of the United States government.
[01:21:24]  But he did say this, nevertheless, and I think it does reflect the thinking at the State Department and in the White House.
[01:21:29]  He said that their goal is for Russian forces to leave Ukraine, all Russian forces leave Ukraine, for Ukraine to be free and independent.
[01:21:40]  With its territory intact, and that we are committed to that outcome, and we're committed to that as long as it takes.
[01:21:49]  Now, that, as you mentioned earlier, is a maximalist policy that posits an end state for this conflict that ends in total, humiliating, and crushing defeat for Russia and the Russian forces in Ukraine.
[01:22:01]  And if you think that Putin is going to accept that without escalating this in ways that are Unimaginable, by which I mean possibly involving a nuclear exchange, then you're not being real.
[01:22:18]  And I don't know if Secretary of State Blinken is just saying that because it feels good to say it, you know, and it's sort of an emotional statement that, you know, we're going to stick with Ukraine until every Russian troop is out of Ukraine and we return to the status quo ante.
[01:22:34]  I don't know if he really believes it, but saying it is a very reckless thing to do because what it is positing and what it is inviting is a very dangerous escalation on the part of Moscow.
[01:22:45]  Because we do not believe, as brave as the Ukrainians have been in fighting these troops coming into their land, that they are going to prevail.
[01:22:54]  I mean, maybe they'll surprise us.
[01:22:56]  I hate to rule it out and say no.
[01:22:59]  And the Russian troops have not been nearly as impressive as we would have expected.
[01:23:02]  I think we can at least say that.
[01:23:05]  But we're not really expecting the Ukrainians to prevail.
[01:23:08]  And so, not without NATO planes and NATO troops, right?
[01:23:12]  That's the thing.
[01:23:13]  Not without, and as many weapons as we want to send, as many CIA operatives as we want to sneak in there.
[01:23:19]  Without Western military going into Ukraine, Ukraine's not likely to win this battle.
[01:23:27]  And we don't know when this battle will end.
[01:23:29]  It could be years, you know, insurgencies basically on the streets of Ukraine, which was, you know, not long ago a beautiful country with living, you know, the citizenry living their life the same way we live our lives, right?
[01:23:40]  Like going to school, going to their jobs, and walking in the streets and hanging out in the town square and the plazas.
[01:23:46]  Now it's going to turn into something like Iraq potentially if this is all we do and Vladimir Putin doesn't.
[01:23:53]  Fold.
[01:23:55]  So, what do you think we should do?
[01:23:57]  You're not in favor of a no fly zone.
[01:23:59]  No, I'm not.
[01:24:00]  Let me just say one more thing on that previous point.
[01:24:03]  The Biden administration seems to think that it can go right up to the line of belligerence without being considered a belligerent by Russia in the belief that their opinion about what constitutes a belligerent in this conflict is the only one that matters.
[01:24:19]  Well, Moscow has a say in what constitutes a belligerent actor as well.
[01:24:25]  And we have to take that into account.
[01:24:28]  And if we take actions that are belligerent, that are acts of war, You know, whether that is establishing a no fly zone, whether that is funneling arms and volunteers into Ukraine, whether that's economic warfare of the kind that we're that's now taking shape, any one of those things or all of them together, at some point, Moscow could decide, you know, what the West is at war with Russia and we're going to treat the West as being at war with Russia.
[01:24:55]  So I just want to say, you know, we're not the only ones who get a vote about that.
[01:24:59]  On the question of the no fly zone, no, I don't support a no fly zone for the simple reason that I don't support.
[01:25:05]  The United States and NATO going to war with Russia over Ukraine.
[01:25:08]  It's as simple as that.
[01:25:09]  And that's what a no fly zone would mean.
[01:25:11]  It would mean going to war.
[01:25:12]  So, what do you see here?
[01:25:15]  Is it hypocritical of us to be praising Zelensky, not us as in you and me sitting here, but like our government to be singing this swan song and praising him and the New York Times every day, how inspirational and so on, when we're not really doing anything that will solve the problem?
[01:25:35]  Yeah, the US corporate media is willing to fight to the last Ukrainian, apparently.
[01:25:43]  And there are other interested parties in the United States and in the West that would very much like to see us continue to funnel arms and materials into Ukraine and who would actually like to see us get involved more deeply militarily as well for their own reasons.
[01:26:00]  I do think it's hypocritical, though, to sort of encourage Ukraine.
[01:26:05]  And this goes back to before the war started.
[01:26:09]  We encouraged Ukraine in a vain hope that, you know, that they would, we would somehow come to their assistance, you know, or implied that we would somehow come to their assistance.
[01:26:22]  We got them to denuclear their country, denukeify.
[01:26:26]  Yeah, but I mean, even more recently, you know, after 2014, and sort of led them down a garden path that is now leading to the destruction of the country because we're not actually going to save Ukraine.
[01:26:39]  And so it is hypocritical of us, and it has been hypocritical of us to.
[01:26:45]  To sort of foster that hope on the part of the Ukrainians when there are no warplanes coming from the West, there are no troops coming from the West, there are no tanks coming from the West.
[01:26:54]  And we should be realistic with them about that.
[01:26:58]  And that maybe gets to the next part.
[01:27:00]  We need to be honest with Ukraine's leaders that we're not going to help in that way.
[01:27:04]  And if they don't think that they can defeat Russia, then we need to start talking about how to get to a negotiated settlement to end the fighting.
[01:27:11]  I mean, we have said it.
[01:27:12]  Joe Biden has said it explicitly that there will be no fly zone.
[01:27:16]  We're not.
[01:27:17]  We're not sending American troops over there.
[01:27:20]  We're trying to handle it in a more behind the scenes way, but we're being open about what we're doing.
[01:27:25]  This is the number of weapons that we've sent.
[01:27:27]  This is the kind of weapons that we've sent.
[01:27:29]  Clearly, we do have people on the ground there.
[01:27:32]  We have special ops or we have CIA operatives because we don't, I'm not a military expert, but my understanding is we don't just ship in the arms and say, like, to the good people of Ukraine.
[01:27:44]  There's a way we get them in.
[01:27:46]  There's a process.
[01:27:47]  Yeah.
[01:27:48]  So we're there to some extent.
[01:27:50]  Putin knows that.
[01:27:51]  And he also has strategic reasons not to treat our escalating sanctions as more than sanctions.
[01:27:58]  He doesn't want a war with the United States.
[01:28:01]  He understands what that looks like or with NATO.
[01:28:03]  He doesn't actually want that.
[01:28:05]  But right now, the off ramp is not obvious.
[01:28:08]  And we're not playing a particular role either.
[01:28:09]  I mean, it's like some guys from Ukraine you never heard of, and some guys from Russia you might once have heard of, but not like Putin, having negotiations that continue to fail, like three of them that have gone nowhere.
[01:28:21]  We haven't articulated what the off ramp might be, in part because I don't think we've thought very deeply about what the off ramp might be for Russia.
[01:28:30]  You know, the problem is as this escalates and if the war begins to go.
[01:28:34]  Poorly for Moscow, there is a real risk that Putin will escalate, especially if he feels that his regime itself and sort of the Russian state itself face existential threat.
[01:28:47]  Then there's no telling what he might do and how he might escalate to widen the war, to use tactical nuclear weapons.
[01:28:57]  So we need to be thinking about this and we need to be articulating what the off ramps are and communicating that.
[01:29:05]  To all the parties involved to try to see if we can de escalate the situation and prevent the worst case scenario.
[01:29:14]  And right now, there's just not any evidence of that.
[01:29:18]  There's plenty of evidence that this is just an emotional driven thing, that there's no vision, there's no strategic vision or plan in the White House.
[01:29:25]  And I mean, look at the people involved.
[01:29:29]  Biden is just completely out of it.
[01:29:33]  This is the worst possible scenario.

=== Preventing Worst Case Scenarios (01:11) ===

[01:29:36]  Scenario for the United States facing a war in Europe to have the group of people in Washington that we have in charge right now.
[01:29:41]  Yeah.
[01:29:41]  We're not even, we won't even, you know, push for our own domestic energy production.
[01:29:46]  It's like, okay, let's ramp up what we already buy from the Saudis.
[01:29:49]  Let's go to Venezuela.
[01:29:50]  That's Venezuela.
[01:29:51]  Whoever thinks Venezuela is the solution, that's the, when you're there, that's a red alarm fire situation.
[01:29:58]  John, thank you so much for all the thoughtful pieces you've done on this.
[01:30:01]  I listened to you with Emily on the Federalist yesterday, and you've been an important voice in this whole discussion.
[01:30:07]  I admire you.
[01:30:08]  Well, thanks for having me on.
[01:30:09]  I really appreciate it.
[01:30:10]  Yeah, all the best.
[01:30:11]  We're going to have much more on this and we're going to continue the discussions.
[01:30:14]  I'm grateful to all of you guys for being a part of it.
[01:30:17]  Don't forget to download the show and we'll see you tomorrow.
[01:30:21]  Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show.
[01:30:23]  No BS, no agenda, and no fear.
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